by Smaill, Anna
I look at the bracelet and I know I have seen it before. Is that how it starts? I take it obediently, fight the rise of sickness in my throat. I squeeze my fingers tight around it and I push myself into it, into the story of it, the past of it. A small gold bracelet. A tiny dark red stone lit in its band.
A long while passes and I open my hand. I have pressed the bracelet into my hand so hard that it marks red then blue in the flesh of my palms. My fingers are numb. I have failed. But as I release it, I know where I have seen it before. The answer is simple and impossible. My mother had one just like it. A chip of red stone in a light gold setting.
‘It’s my mother’s,’ I say flatly. ‘How did it get here?’
She leans in. Her breath smells of strong tea. ‘Did you see? Did you see? Did you see?’
‘No. I didn’t see. I remembered it,’ I say. ‘Isn’t that enough? My mother used to wear it on Sundays. My father gave it to her. How in hell did it get here?’
‘Then you were right the first time,’ she says, and her face closes. ‘You are not the one after all. Not for the forecast and not to keep my memories.’
I feel angry. I am tired of questions, of being tested. I am sick of the very idea of ransacking memory, which is private and silent and should remain so.
‘It is my mother’s bracelet,’ I say into Mary’s face. I stand up. ‘I’m keeping it.’
‘But you must give it back. It’s not meant for you. I should have never let you touch it. Her husband gave it to me. They were happy. Red was her favourite colour. Red tulips. Red amaryllis.’
‘It’s not yours to remember,’ I say, and I push her away.
‘He wanted her memory to stay alive, and so it will, with me. Go back to London. Be happy with your blind friend while you can. Shut your eyes at Chimes. Keep your memories close.’ She claws the bracelet from me and clasps it to her lips.
‘Take this instead.’ From under her cloak she takes the leather pouch she snatched from me at the door. ‘Take it back with you. I am the last keeper and the guild is gone. Dead. Buried. Long, long ago.’
She pushes it into my hand and I feel the animal texture of the leather, the silent reproach of the Lady.
And as I hold it, something shifts.
A familiar feeling comes into me. Water rising. Darkness rising. Rushing in my ears and a swoop as air and earth change sides. Through the haze I see her staring at me. I feel myself fall and there is nothing I can do to fight. I go down . . .
I emerge and I am standing in front of a small stone crosshouse next to a wooden hall. It is familiar. It takes me a beat to see why – it’s our village crosshouse in Essex. Where we went every morning for Onestory and every evening for Vespers. But it is different. The wooden wall is unpainted and raw-looking. I can smell pine and the sap bleeds in places from the wood. I search for a way to understand this. It comes to me. The hall is new. It has not yet been weathered by wind or sun. It has just been built. I am inside a memory that is not my own. That occurred before I was born perhaps.
I look around and I am surrounded by people I do not know. The ground in front of the hall is churned-up bare mud, not the grass I remember. The raised beds that my parents donated bulbs for each year are not there.
People are massed around and pushing against each other. There is a low droning sound of voices. It doesn’t rise or fall, but plays a constant thrum, like water at a slow boil. It is a mix of two notes – fear and excitement.
The crowd moves like an animal, forward and back, testing its muscles. They are farmers, tradespeople, ordinary villagers. Their faces are both blank and keen, and I feel their special fear start to move in me. I push forward with the crowd, and when it pushes back, I resist and move through between those in front of me. I move in the smell of mud and sweat and woolfat and rosin. I push through the crowd until I’m breasting the front line. Ahead of the crowd stand a line of men in brown cloaks, a dam against the tide of villagers who are straining to see. The men are members of the Order. Their transverse flutes are slung across their backs with fine cord.
In the middle, between the members who stand solid and tall and calm like trees, there is a clearing of mud with three mounds of mudded dirt in the centre.
But they are not mud after all. One of the mounds turns against its earth trammels and I see that it is a human head buried up to the shoulders. In the clearing and in the middle of the circle of the Order, there are three people buried in earth, only their faces above. The faces are streaked in mud, the eyes and nose thumbed clear of it like the indentations in a child’s pinch pot, ready for kilning. On each head is a wreath of leaves, splashed with silver paint.
But none of this is the true horror. The true horror is that their mouths are silenced. Each is stopped with a dead creature. The still-living eyes of these buried heads strain as they fight to breathe against the obstruction.
The creatures are black, tawny, wild-looking. My head casts around for some word that will fix them. So black they are almost blue. Not rodent. Not cat. Not lizard. A snakelike head, a small beaded eye, a hooked beak. Blood at the corner of the beak. The words come to me unbidden. Bird. Raven.
And then I understand. The buried are Ravensguild.
I come to. Emerging out of the memory is like rising out of sleep, out of water, out of mud. There is a rushing as if of a great weight pushing down on me. Then a popping sound deep in my ears and the pressure shifts and I am blinking and back in the moonlight.
Mary stands in front of me. A look of hunger, almost jealousy, on her face. Her mouth is open and loose with emotion and I can see her gappy teeth.
‘Well,’ she says, eager. ‘Tell me. Tell me what you saw.’
‘I saw the dead of Ravensguild,’ I say.
She nods avidly. ‘How did you know? How did you know they were Ravensguild?’
‘Because they had been buried up to their necks and crowned with leaves,’ I say. ‘Because they had been gagged with dead ravens.’ I imagine feathers, the taste of dust and mites and earth. I feel the bile sting the back of my throat and I force it down.
Then she says, ‘Fetch him, your dear one out there. There is much to do. Much to do.’
Taking the Memories
Outside, the garden is empty. Moonlight raked across the overgrown lawn, under the oak only a pile of dry leaves. A bubble of fear rises in me, but I press it down. I want to call his name, but I let out a soft whistle instead.
Then I see him. He is lying down behind the oak, like a statue. His head pillowed on his arm and his eyes closed. He is sleeping. I have never, to the full extent of my memory, seen Lucien asleep. I stand and watch him awhile. His face is calm and beautiful. The thought that I should wish to protect him seems somehow as backwards as blasphony. But I can’t help it.
Lucien hears me watching and opens his eyes.
‘Well?’ he says. His voice is as clear and imperious as ever. My thought seems foolish, as I had known it would.
I say, ‘Come on.’
‘What?’ Awake presto, standing. ‘What has happened? You saw her? What did you learn?’
‘She wants to meet you,’ I say.
Inside, Mary makes more tea and examines Lucien.
‘Your friend here,’ she says to him after a while, gesturing with her thumb to me. ‘What is his name?’
The reversed echo of downsounding makes me twitch.
Lucien looks oddly bashful.
‘Simon,’ he says. He stares straight at Mary, though unseeing, as if I were not there and he must hold her gaze.
‘His name is Simon.’
My heart stops and starts, as though I’ve never heard him say my name before. His voice gives it a silvered edge.
‘And do you know what skill Simon has?’ Mary asks.
‘No,’ says Lucien. Then if my eyes tell me right, he blushes. ‘That is to say, Simon has many skills, but . . .’ Annoyance springs to his voice. He is not used to being the one who answers questions. ‘What do you mean exactly
?’
Mary smiles and she winks at me as if she has caught Lucien out in some sort of game.
‘Simon can see memory. Like I can. See it! Not just his own, mind. Minds of others. That’s a rare thing, a fair thing, a precious thing. There were fewer of us in the guild, and then fewer still. Leaves on the tree after the winds came in . . . and I was all that was left. Last and lonely.
‘But now there’s Simon. Simple Simon. Simonides. And he will be the last after all. Not Mary.’
She says that thoughtfully, as if remarking on the weather. Then she comes to stand between us. ‘And now you two want to travel to the Citadel.’
Lucien is pale again, controlled.
‘Yes. To destroy the Carillon.’
Mary’s lips open in a strange smile, and she starts to sing again in her rough voice.
‘Simple Simon went to look
If he could pluck the thistle;
He pricked his fingers very much,
Which made poor Simon whistle.
‘You need more than a whistle to destroy the Carillon, my dearling. Chimes are strong as mettle can make them. A dangerous nettle indeed. How do you plan to pluck her?’
Her smile is full of relish.
Lucien turns to me. The plan is a sketch in the air, thin as the broidered river of his mother’s map. Go to Oxford. Get a message to Sonja. Enter the Citadel with her help. And get inside the Carillon. Beyond that we have not talked.
The thought returns. I’ve been stuck in a dark room that I thought was the whole world. But now I see that, even if the doors in that room open, the difficult part is knowing which to choose. How does any of us know, after what has been taken away? And I see Clare again, on the strand, cutting her own path of story. I see the mirrorsmooth reflection of mudflats, a flatness unbroken. And I see that we cannot destroy the Carillon without returning some part of what has been taken from us.
‘We need memories,’ I say. ‘We need memories that tell the truth of the Order, and what they did in the time after Allbreaking.’ Lucien is looking at me. ‘We need to put them together so that they form a line that starts in one place and moves to another place.’
They’re both looking. It is Mary who breaks the silence. ‘Yes, and what then, my darling?’ she asks, coy and with cocked head.
‘Then it will smash the circle that is Onestory. We will return what’s been stolen by the Order and by Chimes – time past and time hereafter.’
‘And say I help you, my dear. What then? If you are successful, well and good – no need for Mary in that sweet hereafter. But what if you fail, as in all likelihood you will? What happens to Mary then? I’ll be here, still here. Still keeping the memories. That’s no good for me, I’m afraid. I’ll help you, but I’ll need something of yours in exchange.’
Neither Lucien nor I say anything.
‘I need to know that if you fail, you will return to me to take over your duties.’
I look at Lucien. There is no picture in my mind of a time in which we succeed, and none of one where we fail either. Would either of us survive it? Mary’s is a blind bargain, but I don’t see a way out of it.
‘Yes,’ I say, turning away from Lucien. ‘If we fail, I’ll come back.’
‘Good, good,’ says Mary. ‘That is honourable. And if we listen to the forecast, you’re a man who keeps his word.’ She winks conspiratorially at Lucien. ‘He’ll not let you down this one, smitten as he is.’
I flush against my will, but Lucien acts as though he is deaf as well as blind.
‘But, my dear,’ says Mary, turning back to me, ‘you won’t think ill of the old bird if I insist on something to secure the deal? It’s not that I don’t trust you. Just that youth has its own code. If you give your word to him and your word to me, in a pinch which of them will you follow? I can’t let love get in the way of what’s rightfully mine.’
‘What do you want?’ I ask.
‘You need memories. Memories in my keeping, to forge this story of yours. The important ones.’
I nod, impatient.
‘Then you must give me some of your own in exchange,’ she says, and eyes my memory bag.
I look at her. Doubt fills me. Can I keep them alive? I know I have no choice. I nod once, without looking at Lucien.
Mary examines me, like she is tasting the quality of my agreement. Checking its balance of fear and folly.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’
And so we begin. Lucien enters the room with us, carrying my memory bag. He and I sit in the clearing between the shelves.
Mary looks at us both and then seems to disappear somewhere inside herself. Her eyes cloud and she stands apart. She looks like a moony, as if at any moment she might begin to make the starburst hand movements of their kind.
She is travelling, moving through the map of the memories just as Lucien navigates the map of the under. I imagine the constellations of memory pulsing out at her like nuggets of Pale.
Then her eyes sharpen and she suddenly moves forward with purpose. She ducks round the shelf to our right and after a few minutes returns. Her eyes twinkle with triumph. She is holding an old book, or what remains of it. The leather and gilt-embossed cover is charred, the edges scalloped, as if eaten by some large black worm.
‘Hot potato,’ Mary calls, and throws the book across the room to me. It flutters in the wind of its arc and I see words in formation. Code, like birds flying.
I catch the book. It is very old and has been burnt. Flakes of ash still cling, delicate as feathers, to the edges of the thin paper inside. I turn blank pages until I see code.
THE
TRAGE
OF
HAML
Prince of Denm
William Shakesp
it says.
I feel a rush of hot air hard on my face, so hot that it tightens my skin and my eyebrows stir. I go down . . .
I am standing in a small public square. Behind me is a low fence with black spiked railings. In front, consuming all of the surrounding air, is a huge bonfire. The smoke is fragrant. To my left and right are tall, filigreed buildings made of pale honeyed stone. The building behind the fire stands on a small, neat apron of green grass, now scorched black. The building itself is circular and self-contained, somehow confident. It makes me think of a beehive. Or a walnut. A clever casing to protect a small, hollow universe.
King of infinite space, says a voice in my head. The voice of the memory’s owner? Where am I? Not London. Nowhere I have been before, as far as I remember.
But the feeling inside the memory, that’s familiar. Because it’s one I know well. Helplessness. I look down and almost expect to see arms or legs bound. But I am standing free. Black robes hang around me. I watch.
The neat circular building is being gutted. Men and women in brown cloaks emerge from its many doors. They stream from other buildings to the left and right. They carry books. Books stacked so high on platformed arms that they can barely see the path ahead. Books laid on cloaks and pulled behind like threshers pulling hay.
One by one the cloaked figures enter the neat rectangle of the public square, bounded by the black rails I lean against. And one by one they throw their burden into the flames.
The flames leap. Sparks wriggle through the air like bright insects. The fire towers hungry in the night. And through the smoke and flames and the tread of feet, and the whump as books take their flight into fire, I hear chanting. I recognise the tune. It is Onestory.
‘Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.
Order of the Carillon.
Music of the skies.’
The voices are so beautiful. They weave in and out in complex harmony. Each cloaked man and woman sings, and their faces are lit. I feel myself rising up, pulling away.
The voices float up with me, never broken, circling and perfect.
I emerge with my face in my hands as if I am shielding myself from heat.
Lucien is next to me, his hand on my shoulder
.
‘What did you see?’ he asks.
I shake my head, still half inside. ‘They were burning code,’ I say. ‘Members of the Order. At least, I think it was the Order.’
But there was something wrong with the picture. The jangling of a note out of place. The circular building so confident in the meat of its own secret. It had windows. And all of its windows were made of glass. Unbroken glass.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I say.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘None of the windows were broken.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Standing in a square watching a bonfire. There was a round building with a mettle roof.’ I think how to describe it. ‘Like the middle dome of Paul’s crosshouse in London, but just sitting by itself.’
‘And the windows were glass?’
‘Yes.’
‘There is a building like that in Oxford,’ says Lucien thoughtfully. ‘But it’s not in a square – it’s built into the East Wall as a gatehouse. And it has para windows like everywhere else.’
‘There were tall buildings around it,’ I say. ‘Tall and thin, made out of the same golden stone.’
Lucien breathes in. ‘I think it was Oxford,’ he says. ‘I think you saw Oxford before Allbreaking.’
‘But the Order were there,’ I say slowly. ‘They were wearing travelling cloaks. Brown like now. They were singing Onestory.’
I look at Lucien and see understanding reach him the same second it hits me. It fills his eyes like a wave. Huge and dark.
The Order didn’t rise up out of the ashes of dischord at all. They were there, waiting. They knew what was coming. They had already started burning code.
And then the next wave swoops in, carrying the full weight of its sickness. Allbreaking was not the end of a long conflict. It was just a necessary step. A harsh chord before their resolution of new harmony. Allbreaking was brought about by the Order.
Mary is behind us.
‘Chop, chop, lovelies. No time for talk. I’ve given you the first one, an important one at that. Now you must keep your side of the bargain.’ She points with a wrinkled finger at my memory bag, which is sitting on the floor beside me.